It wasn’t so very long ago that some Americans held people as slaves, other human beings as their own private property, as if that person were a horse or a chair, to do with, to use, abuse, exploit, beat, and rape as they pleased.  What’s more, until the late 1840s most Americans thought that slavery was acceptable.  The great majority found themselves somewhere along a spectrum that at one end actually exalted slavery as a positive thing, a benefit to black people they deemed radically inferior, and at the other end said, Well, it’s a real shame, and I certainly don’t condone it or want it where I live, but what’s done is done, and I guess it isn’t the worst thing in the world, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it now, so that’s that.  And in between those two ends of the spectrum rested any number of justifications and rationalizations that people used to explain, excuse, praise, rationalize, or simply accept the reality of human bondage in their nation.